The San Francisco calamity by earthquake and fire eBook

It is the same with the earthquake as with the volcano.
The surface of the earth is never quite still.
Tremors are constantly passing onward which can be
distinguished by delicate instruments, but only rarely
are these of sufficient force to become noticeable,
except by instrumental means. At intervals, however,
the power beneath the surface raises the ground in
long, billow-like motions, before which, when of violent
character, no edifice or human habitation can for a
moment stand. The earth is frequently rent asunder,
great fissures and cavities being formed. The
course of rivers is changed and the waters are swallowed
up by fissures rent in the surface, while ruin impends
in a thousand forms. The cities become death
pits and the cultivated fields are buried beneath
floods of liquid mud. Fortunately these convulsions,
alike of the earthquake and volcano, are comparative
rarities and are confined to limited regions of the
earth’s surface. What do we know of those
deep-lying powers, those vast buried forces dwelling
in uneasy isolation beneath our feet? With all
our science we are but a step beyond the ancients,
to whom these were the Titans, great rebel giants whom
Jupiter overthrew and bound under the burning mountains,
and whose throes of agony shook the earth in quaking
convulsions. To us the volcanic crater is the
mouth from which comes the fiery breath of demon powers
which dwell far down in the earth’s crust.
The Titans themselves were dwarfs beside these mighty
agents of destruction whose domain extends for thousands
of miles beneath the earth’s surface and which
in their convulsions shake whole continents at once.
Such was the case in 1812, when the eruption of Mont
Soufriere on St. Vincent, as told in a later chapter,
formed merely the closing event in a series of earthquakes
which had made themselves felt under thousands of miles
of land.

ANCIENT AWE OF VOLCANOES

In olden times volcanoes were regarded with superstitious
awe, and it would have been considered highly impious
to make any investigation of their actions. We
are told by Virgil that Mt. Etna marks the spot
where the gods in their anger buried Enceladus, one
of the rebellious giants. To our myth-making
ancestors one of the volcanoes of the Mediterranean,
set on a small island of the Lipari group, was the
workshop of Vulcan, the god of fire, within whose
depths he forged the thunderbolts of the gods.
From below came sounds as of a mighty hammer on a vast
anvil. Through the mountain vent came the black
smoke and lurid glow from the fires of Vulcan’s
forge. This old myth is in many respects more
consonant with the facts of nature than myths usually
are. In agreement with the theory of its internal
forces, the mountain in question was given the name
of Volcano. To-day it is scarcely known at all,
but its name clings to all the fire-breathing mountains
of the earth.